# Who predicted integrated circuits in science fiction? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 3, 2011, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990 "2011-04-03T00:31:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/81 "2011-04-05T12:08:09Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Dude, I know because this is my field. I’ve studied it for decades. I’ve done 500\* > times more reading on the subject than you have. What I’ve learned is that writings about the future are more dependent on what is happening in that present than on anything else. Predictions from the past are a game for amateurs. I think of them as I would proofs of trisecting the angle. Mathematicians know it can’t be done because it’s proven to be impossible. But amateurs love to prove it anyway. And they can’t be told that their “proofs” are meaningless. > > Predictions - right or wrong - make for easy feature articles and gushing websites. No serious historian ever talks about rightness or wrongness, though. They talk about why the person thought at the time that this was something that should be said. (You can’t seriously think that Poe was the first person to realize that a balloon needed steering, can you?) That’s far more interesting and instructive about the past, but also tremendously more work. > \*I had a professor who told the class that a good teacher should know 500 times more about the subject than the pupils. Every day and every webpage I read I realize more and more how right he was. What you are describing aren’t facts. You are describing your own dogma and ideology. You believe predictions of the future are just random or accidents. Let it be. It is your oppinion. That way, there is no way we have a ballanced talking on the topic of why some people describe the future so well. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/82 "2011-04-05T12:19:40Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I think the idea of an earth satellite was “predicted” about a billion years before Hale’s story (which I’ve read.) It would be interesting to read your sources. > [@Voyager](#): > > Verne’s prediction of moon travel didn’t include them getting smeared on the floor of the cabin the way they would have been. Wells considered his book more accurate because at least it didn’t violate the laws of nature quite so blatantly (only more subtly.) While warp drive may be nonsensical, it is less so than a story which has the ship accelerate to ftl speeds. > . Indeed. That part is fantasious, but at least he predicted retrorockets. > [@Voyager](#): > > As mentioned, Clarke’s article was not sf at all. And he always assumed that comsats would have all sorts of people manning them, not that they’d be full of ICs (remember them?) and sit in orbit with no human assistance. Yes, I remember Thunderbird’s satellites and its human opperators 😃 ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/83 "2011-04-05T12:25:15Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > I’d be really, really surprised if he did. What I expect he did (because he did this in _Space Cadet_) was to put a hand held portable communication device in the hands of one of his characters. And what makes people think it’s a cell phone is that he called that device a telephone and the character was a teenager. > > None of those constitutes inventing the cell phone. A hand held communication device is not necessarily a cell phone. Portable communication devices had been used in fiction for at least a couple decades before those books were written, although they were usually given some other name, such as the ultraphones in Doc Smith’s _Triplanetary_. Furthermore, the mobile phone was actually invented sometime around when _Space Cadet_ was written. > > The key idea behind a cell phone is the network of cells that make it possible for thousands of people in a fairly small area to use them at the same time. If someone doesn’t describe that, then they did not predict the cell phone. Yes, it was in Space Cadet and not in Spaceship Gallileo… :smack: Now, the idea of cell phones has been around since the invention of the radio. There is a picture somewhere of portable phones around the year 1900. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/84 "2011-04-05T15:32:59Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > What you are describing aren’t facts. You are describing your own dogma and ideology. You believe predictions of the future are just random or accidents. Let it be. It is your oppinion. That way, there is no way we have a ballanced talking on the topic of why some people describe the future so well. Yes, they are opinions. But they are informed opinions. The point that my professor was trying to make was not that he was 500 times smarter than us - as my freshman ears perceived - but that he had done the hard, long, slogging, often boring work that would turn his opinions into informed opinions. I now count that the single most valuable piece of advice I received in college. I’m passing it forward. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/85 "2011-04-05T16:49:25Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Yes, they are opinions. But they are informed opinions. > > The point that my professor was trying to make was not that he was 500 times smarter than us - as my freshman ears perceived - but that he had done the hard, long, slogging, often boring work that would turn his opinions into informed opinions. I now count that the single most valuable piece of advice I received in college. > > I’m passing it forward. In that case, I would like to see the evidence. Books? Research? links? That would be interesting. I am always willing to learn something new. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/86 "2011-04-05T17:29:09Z")
> [@](#): > > Wells couldn’t have disliked the notion too much, because he has characters shot into space in two of his own works – that’s how the Martian invaders get to Earth in The War of the Worlds, after all. To be fair, we don’t know how long the Martian cannon was, nor the g-tolerance of Martians, and they did have a smaller planet to launch from. So it’s possible that it might have worked for them. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/87 "2011-04-05T17:35:44Z")
> [@](#): > > To be fair, we don’t know how long the Martian cannon was, nor the g-tolerance of Martians, and they did have a smaller planet to launch from. So it’s possible that it might have worked for them. They landed on earth without benefit of retro-rockets, splatting down under earth’s gravity. Unless it’s a really long cannon, I don’t think you’d have much success launching humans from Mars without damage. And, although he describes the Martian skin as like leather, wells’ description of the Martians makes them out to be blobby and not all that tough, laboring under the greater force of Earth’s gravity. I still call special pleading – shooting martians from guns (and having them land without benefit of rocket or parachute) seems like it’d likely be fatal. Edited to add: Mars escape velocity is about 1/2 of Earth’s. Still pretty significant: [http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html) ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/88 "2011-04-05T17:45:18Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > One has to conclude that Verne was deliberately fudging the problem of acceleration in his story in order to use straight extrapolation for the rest of it. As Walter James Miller argues in _The Annotated From the Earth to the Moon_, Verne generally did his background science studies pretty well. (Verne wrote not just one sequel to FTETTM, but two. In the second sequel, called _Topsy Turvy_, or sometimes _The Purchase of the North Pole_, he finally admits that one of the effects of realkly big cannon shots doesn’t make any physical sense, and uses that as the significant Plot Point onto which he hangs his story.) So this is a “gimme” that he glosses over in order to get on with the rest of the story. Certainly, but it also certainly doesn’t count as a successful prediction. I suspect he also knew that “To the Sun/Off on a Comet” was not plausible either. (If he had thought, he could have written “A Pail of Air” nearly a century before Leiber did. ) > [@](#): > > Wells couldn’t have disliked the notion too much, because _he_ has characters shot into space in two of his own works – that’s how the Martian invaders get to Earth in _The War of the Worlds_, after all. But he came back and used the idea again in his 1930s film _Things to Come_, long after it was clear that this was Not a Good Idea, and that people would get smeared into jam, and after he’d criticized Verne for the same thing. And, I might add, after we’d already had a perfectly good movie depicting space flight via rocket, Fritz Lang’s _Die Frau im Mond_. He even has someone giving an impassioned speech about the Space Gun. Didn’t “Things to Come” end just as they were launching the moon expedition? Maybe the words after the closing credits were “Oh, shit.” 🙂 Lang had the advantage of a good set of rocketry advisers also. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read Willy Ley’s description of how they were involved with Lang and the movie. > [@](#): > > As an aside, Wells’ anti-gravity sphere wasn’t exactly a new notion. It has been used about a half a dozen times before his relatively late _First Men in the moon_. Cromie’s _A Plunge Into Space_ even uses a spherical craft covered with anti-gravity plates to get to Mars over a decade before Wells’ book. It bears a peculiar introduction supposedly by Jules Verne, which is suspect because a.) Verne didn’t read English; and b.) Verne speaks glowingly of the anti-gravity sphere in the intro, but , years later, criticized wells’ book for using so unscientific a notion. That’s a book I wasn’t aware of, thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/89 "2011-04-05T17:50:10Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > They landed on earth without benefit of retro-rockets, splatting down under earth’s gravity. Unless it’s a really long cannon, I don’t think you’d have much success launching humans from Mars without damage. And, although he describes the Martian skin as like leather, wells’ description of the Martians makes them out to be blobby and not all that tough, laboring under the greater force of Earth’s gravity. > > I still call special pleading – shooting martians from guns (and having them land without benefit of rocket or parachute) seems like it’d likely be fatal. > Edited to add: Mars escape velocity is about 1/2 of Earth’s. Still pretty significant: > > [http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html) You have to think there was something else involved beyond what the narrator said, since I doubt it is likely that many of the Martians would have hit Earth at all in a free trajectory without course corrections. Unless more Martians were stuck in solar orbit than ever arrived, they must have had some maneuvering capability. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/90 "2011-04-05T17:58:12Z")
> [@](#): > > Certainly, but it also certainly doesn’t count as a successful prediction. I never said it was. I don’t anyone ever did. There are claims that an awful lot of Verne’s descriptions match reality uncannily well, but I don’t think anyone took his Gun Launching as a serious prediction. I agree that it’d make a whole lot more sense if the Martians had course-correction capabilities, but Wells doesn’t give any indication of that. The ships are observed from Earth en route, and he never describes any suggestion of course corrections. I think he would have, if he thought it necessary. I suspect he never really considered the extreme difficulty of sending ships across space and through gravity wells. In Wells’ mind, it appears that the Martian trip was an exercise in _really_ precise ballistics, rather than rocketry. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/91 "2011-04-05T18:03:32Z")
> [@](#): > > Lang had the advantage of a good set of rocketry advisers also. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read Willy Ley’s description of how they were involved with Lang and the movie. I have, and I’ve seen the film. It looks as if the Germans just built a moon rocket and simply filmed the results – it’s pretty impressive. wells disdained the German approach. He didn’t care for _Metropolis_, but, for my money, Metropolis is a more watchable film with better effects. wells certainly could have had good technical advice – there was a British rocketry society, too, after all. But he apparently didn’t take advantage. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/92 "2011-04-05T20:02:00Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I never said it was. I don’t anyone ever did. There are claims that an awful lot of Verne’s descriptions match reality uncannily well, but I don’t think anyone took his Gun Launching as a serious prediction. > I agree that it’d make a whole lot more sense if the Martians had course-correction capabilities, but Wells doesn’t give any indication of that. The ships are observed from Earth en route, and he never describes any suggestion of course corrections. I think he would have, if he thought it necessary. I suspect he never really considered the extreme difficulty of sending ships across space and through gravity wells. In Wells’ mind, it appears that the Martian trip was an exercise in _really_ precise ballistics, rather than rocketry. I see it as the Narrator not understanding how the Martians did it. I doubt they had the capability to note small course corrections anyhow. In fact, they used an electrical anti-gravity spacedrive in [Edison’s Conquest of Mars.](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19141/19141-h/19141-h.htm) ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/93 "2011-04-05T20:05:41Z")
> [@](#): > > I see it as the Narrator not understanding how the Martians did it. I doubt they had the capability to note small course corrections anyhow. It all depends on whether you’re asking What Really Happened or Retconning . You pays your money and you takes your point of view. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/94 "2011-04-06T13:24:08Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Space elevators don’t necessarily have to be huge except in length. It’s been proposed that the first one might be a ribbon only a few centimeters wide and less than a millimeter thick, able to haul up a few hundred kilos at a time. If for any reason it broke, the lower part would mostly burn up in the Earth’s upper atmosphere and what didn’t would float to the ground like confetti. > > The problem with laser propulsion is that if the laser facility costs hundred of billions of dollars, launches won’t be cheap even after amortizing the cost over decades. Plus there’s the problem that it would effectively be an enormously powerful beam weapon capable of destroying anything in it’s line of sight for hundreds of kilometers. That’s going to worry a lot of people. Very interesting. When it is expected to exist a cable strong enough to try a space elevator? With respect to laser propulsion, I know it is an impractical dream for now, at least from the economical point of view. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/95 "2011-04-06T15:38:11Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > In that case, I would like to see the evidence. Books? Research? links? That would be interesting. I am always willing to learn something new. > > Thanks. I wish there were a standard canon or curriculum. The only advice I have is to read Everything. By Everything I mean you have to go beyond science fiction or those proto-science fiction stories you mentioned. Utopias and dystopias were more numerous and sometimes more popular. There was a vogue in Europe before WWI for novels that depicted Germany or Russia declaring war on France or Britain. Dime novels had engineering heroes and those spread to pulp magazines and children’s books like Tom Swift. Most magazines printed stories, satires, parodies, and romances that riffed on the current world. Then there’s all the science. Popular science has been written since forever, and there are hundreds of early books. Wells wrote far more nonfiction extrapolation than fiction extrapolation. Every scientist, inventor, industrialist, and innovator was interviewed for every magazine. Gernsback himself started some of the first 20th century science magazines, although Scientific American had been around since the 1850s. Popular Science has all its issues searchable online. But you can’t limit it to science or inventions. They exist in a world. So all of sociology and the soft sciences. Food, diet, medicine, population, immigration, communication, transportation, economics, political systems, architecture. Entertainment and art and culture, too. One place to find these concentrated are in the World’s Fairs, which served to bring together all the latest devices and technologies and peoples from around the world. There were around two dozen major ones and hundreds of minor fairs and while there are lots of websites, they’ve barely been scratched as a subject. Or, just look out your window at the complexities of the world today. Everything in that world is a possible subject. That’s overwhelming. But the world was just as complex in the past. And there’s far more past. No straight lines exist from all those pasts to today. It’s like investigating all the seaweed in the ocean. Finding a beginning and finding an end doesn’t imply that the middles meet. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/96 "2011-04-06T17:43:49Z")
Yes, I know it. I have been searching for that information all my life, as you have done. I have found that many predictions are far off, but that some people is more accurate than others. I also found out that the better informed about science a technology a predictor is, the chances of making a good prediction is better. My conclusion? Every person can have a glipse of the future if research the topic he/she is going to foresee with caution and precision. It is not magical or supernatural at all. The only danger in predictions is when fantasy (the mad of the house) interfiere. Of course, you can’t foresee random events, like what will be the number than wins the lotto, but you can predict with a degree of certainty many other events. You can’t predict, either, some accidental events, such as a nuclear terror attack, WW III, or an allien invasion… But besides that, many political, economical but particularly technical changes are predictable. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/97 "2011-04-06T18:00:01Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > You have to think there was something else involved beyond what the narrator said, since I doubt it is likely that many of the Martians would have hit Earth at all in a free trajectory without course corrections. Unless more Martians were stuck in solar orbit than ever arrived, they must have had some maneuvering capability. “The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety–their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours” -War of the Worlds, Chapter One. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/98 "2011-04-06T19:33:42Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > Very interesting. When it is expected to exist a cable strong enough to try a space elevator? Nobody knows. It has to wait until someone invents a material strong enough to create the cable. Actually, it is the strength vs. weight ratio that is critical. We have cables strong enough, they are just too heavy – their own weight breaks them in a cable long enough to reach space. The last I heard, they were looking at biological systems to find a way to make such a material. I think that spider webs would actually work, if they could find a way to scale them up to make a space elevator cable. Or if they could figure out how they work, and how to manufacture a cable that way. I’ve no idea how that research is going. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/99 "2011-04-06T19:38:07Z")
Yes. I suspected that. The Space elevator needs a technological breakthrought to be achievable: resistent cables. By comparison, laser propulsion is feasible today, only that it is so expensive nobody will invest on it. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2011, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990/100 "2011-04-06T20:06:47Z")
Again, carbon nanofiber is strong and light enough, moreso than spider silk. Currently, we can make it in lengths of a few centimeters, so obviously, we’ve got some scaling up to do. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-predicted-integrated-circuits-in-science-fiction/576990.md?page=4)